Kathryn Kysar is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. A previous AWP board member, Kysar is the director of the creative writing program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Minneapolis.

April Gibson is a Black poet, writer, and professor whose work appears in The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Her forthcoming book of poetry will be published by Amistad Press/Harper Collins in 2024. April teaches English at Malcolm X College in Chicago.

Ashley E. Wynter lives in Minneapolis where she participated in a regional Cave Canem workshop. She won first place in the fifty-third New Millennium Award for Poetry and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review and Water~Stone Review. Wynter is editor at Copper Canyon Press.

Halee Kirkwood is a poet and descendant of the Fond Du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. They are a 2023–25 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, an inaugural In-Na-Po fellow, and were a 2019–20 Loft Mentor Series Fellow. Their work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Ecotone, Poem-A-Day, and others.

Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto lives in Lincoln, Nebraska where he is pursuing his PhD in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a focus on creative writing (poetry). His works have appeared in Isele Magazine, AFREADA, Poet Lore, Massachusetts Review, Frontier Poetry, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere.